Rob’s European Vacation 2009

So I woke up early (my hostel roommates went to bed at 5 so waking up at 9 is really early!) and got ready.  Had some breakfast and checked out.  I left my big bag with my laptop stuffed in it locked up at the hostel and took off to go on my Dachau tour.

For 19 Euros, transportation and a guide are provided for our trip.  Dachau is about 20 minutes outside of Munich and again Matt was my tourguide.  I really am impressed by the guy’s knowledge of the 3rd Reich and his perspectives on things.  I guess he impressed a few other people too because about four of us returned from the day before to take his tour again!

So we got to Dachau and got off the bus.  The memorial site is very…incognito from the outside.  There is a sign but you’d never know what laid behind those trees if you didn’t walk down the pebble strewn walkway.  Matt was really good and gave us a very in-depth story on the causes of the camp, how it wasn’t originally used for Jews and Russians and how people from all over the continent were interned there.  Great overview…

So we entered the camp and passed by the famous phrase, “Arbeit Mach Frei”.  Work will set you free.  For some this was the case at Dachau but for many many others, this wasn’t.  For those unfortunate souls, they either lost their lives there at Dachau or were shipped off to places like Auschwitz.  Officially around 32,000 people lost their lives at Dachau but as we were told, in the last years of the war, Jewish and Russian prisoners were rarely documented upon their arrival or extermination.  Therefore there really is no real way to know how many people perished at the hands of the Nazis.

The museum itself was great, original buildings still survive and it went into great detail to show why the Nazis came to power and were supported.  Then it dealt with the way the prisoners were treated and the punishments they went through.  Brutal stuff.

I think the most poingnant and surreal moment for me was the crematorium and outside the crematorium.  Outside and behind the building was a special burial place where they disposed of the ashes of 11,000 plus bodies that were burned.  And just behind that was the camp’s fence, still scared from the bullet holes where they used to line up the prisioners and just shoot them on the spot.  There was even a section labeled “Pistol range” where they would use the prisoners as targets for shooting.  Disgusting.  Inside the crematorium, they have the actual ovens lined up.  The sad thing was that there were actually two crematoriums, because the first one wasn’t big enough to deal with all the bodies that needed to be burned.  Sick.

Also in the same building as the crematorium was the Shower room.  It was surreal walking inside of that room, the celing was low and the spot where the shower heads were was just empty above it, no pipes or nothing.  A true rouse to get people to think they were getting a rare shower instead of meeting their maker.  Soo sad.

I left Dachau just thinking about how surreal it all was that so much torture and sadness occurred on what would have been a beautiful peace of land.  It reminds me of what a horrible race of individuals we are and how, no matter how hard it seems, we should be nicer to each other.  Every little nice thing we may do, goes a long way to making all of us a better people.

After we got back to Munich I grabbed my bag from the hostel and grabbed a train to go to Zurich.  From Zurich I grabbed another train to Bern and then finally another train to Interlaken.  I arrived in Interlaken at about midnight…settled down and hit the sack.  Big day of hiking the next day!

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